Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the management of virtual machines. More specifically, the present invention relates to management of the system resources in a virtual machine environment.
Background of the Related Art
In a cloud computing environment, a user is assigned a virtual machine somewhere in the computing cloud. The virtual machine provides the software operating system and has access to physical resources, such as input/output bandwidth, processing power and memory capacity, to support the user's application. Provisioning software manages and allocates virtual machines among the available computer nodes in the cloud. Because each virtual machine runs independent of other virtual machines, multiple operating system environments can co-exist on the same computer in complete isolation from each other.
Today, there are more virtual machines being deployed than physical servers. The process of deploying a new virtual machine is now so simple that a system administrator may create them for a wide variety of temporary purposes, such as testing, debugging, and temporary development environments. Many of these short-time-use, long-time-deployed virtual machines are not shut down at the end of their use and live on as zombie virtual machines.
There are software tools available that a system administrator can run in order to determine which virtual machines that are behaving similar to a zombie virtual machine. However, the system administrator must then carefully review the resulting list of virtual machines and determine which virtual machines are actually zombie virtual machines that should be shut down. Unfortunately, careful consideration may require a large time commitment and the resulting decisions may not be entirely accurate.